The vowel system of Setswana consists of seven vowels and four raised variants of the mid vowels. The data presented in this article should lead to a more scientific description and presentation of the Setswana vowels. To improve this situation, an acoustic study was carried out. Due to the lack of scientific evidence to support these descriptions, many discrepancies exist that were transferred to the vowel charts as well. Descriptions of the Setswana vowels as found in textbooks and other sources are mainly articulatory in nature and are based on auditive perceptions. This article aims at the presentation of data recovered from an acoustic analysis of the vowels of Setswana (S31), a Bantu language spoken in Botswana, the North Western, Northern Cape and Gauteng provinces of South Africa. In conclusion, this thesis makes contributions to two linguistics fields, grammar and prosody since, on one hand, it completes the grammatical description of insubordinated clauses making an exhaustive and homogenous study of their prosody and, on the other hand, it contributes to the dialectal description of Spanish prosody and delivers to the community of phoneticians a series of tools that will ease their work analysis in a daily basis. The perceptual tests prove that speakers use intonation to classify clauses into elliptical or insubordinated categories. Moreover, both groups differ from a third group of constructions that show dyadic dependence. It shows that elliptical and insubordinated clauses differ in prosody. The thesis argues that prosody is an acoustic cue of the level of dependence of the studied constructions. The theoretical contribution to insubordination is made both by means of acoustic and perceptual data. In addition to that, the data contributes to the dialectal description of prosody since two undescribed patterns to realize contrastive declaratives have been found in Seville (¡H*L% y H+L*L%). The data shows that the intonation of insubordinated clauses depends on their discursive function. From the descriptive point of view, the thesis describes the prosodic realization of seven elliptical and seven insubordinated constructions in four locales of Spain (Madrid, Cantabria, Barcelona and Seville). Among them, the most salient contribution is a rule-based system for the recognition and transcription of prosody that uses a Sp_ToBI and Cat_ToBI labelling conventions. From the methodological point of view, the thesis presents several scripts created by the thesis author. The third goal is theoretical: using the prosodic results to explain current issues in the theory of insubordination, and, in particular, determining the level of syntactic dependence of constructions using their prosody. The second goal is mainly descriptive: the prosodic description of connective-argumentative insubordinated constructions and elliptical constructions in Spanish. The first one is methodological: creating tools that ease the prosodic analysis of data. This thesis sheds light on the prosodic realization of independent (insubordinated) clauses with subordination marks in Spanish.
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